What does a leading "\??\" on a windows path mean?

Posted by kdt on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by kdt
Published on 2010-04-15T09:01:25Z Indexed on 2010/04/15 9:03 UTC
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Windows

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path

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getmodulefilenameex

When using GetModuleFileNameEx to query the image path of a running process, some processes have an image path that starts with "\??\". For example, while most processes start "C:\WINDOWS", some processes start "\??\C:\WINDOWS".

What does the leading \??\ mean on a windows path?

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